I realize “Rainbow Six Siege is getting a new operator” is at a “Malibu Stacy is getting a new hat” level of predictability at this point, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening or that I’m not going to tell you about it. Rainbow Six Siege is getting a new operator, her codename is Ram, and she’s from Korea.

Ram joins Siege as part of Year 8 Season 3, and is unlockable with the premium battle pass or by spending Renown or R6 Credits if you wait a couple of weeks. She’s got a gadget called the BU-GI Auto-Breacher, which is “an armored drone that tears apart destructible floors, busts through barricades, and wrecks Defender traps as it rolls autonomously forward on its path”, as Ubisoft’s announcement puts it.

Her drone is all about destruction rather than stealth, with buzz…

The Kyoto District court has found 27 year-old Takemi Kazama guilty of intimidation of business by repeatedly posting threats of harm, in relation to posts made using a Nintendo website’s online form in August and November 2023 (thanks, NHK).

Kazama’s actions resulted in the cancellation of the Nintendo Live 2024 event, which was to be held in January this year, as well as other events like the December 2023 Japanese Splatoon championship and this year’s Splatoon and Mario Kart championships (the latter pair were subsequently re-scheduled and went ahead in April without incident). At the time Nintendo refused to give details of the threats, other than saying the matter was with police, and that per a company statement “we decided we could not amply ensure the safety of our …

One of the most common reasons a game becomes unplayable is because it can only be played online and its servers have been shut down by publishers. In 2023 alone we saw nearly a dozen games like Battlefield, Call of Duty: Warzone, Knockout City, Spellbreak, Gundam Evolution, and more meet the same grim fate as the lights went off for good. 

There are two tragedies when games go dark. First off, the work of all those programmers, artists, writers, animators, modelers, and everyone else who labored on a game, maybe for years, is gone forever. Killing a game is also anti-consumer because, y’know… people bought that game. They paid for a product, the same way they’d buy a book, a movie, or a song, and they should be able to use that product for as long as they like. Troubl…

Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail is entering early access later this week—and, in addition to announcing the official start date for those VIP doors (and dropping an actual Aetheryte in the middle of London) Square Enix has asked players to please, pretty please, be nice about spoilers.

In an official news post, which highlights that Dawntrail’ll be entering its early access period at 2 am PDT (that’s 10 am BST, or 5 pm PST) June 28—and that email codes will be coming to Dawntrail hopefuls today—the developer additionally put a small ask at the foot of the page, which reads:

“During the early access period, there will be no restrictions on what content you can discuss, post, or stream,” Square Enix then asks, with the air of a parent wanting their teenage kids n…

This moment has been a long time coming. Noctua, creator of many of the best PC fans, is making some more. Specifically, the NF-A14x25 G2, which is now set to arrive sometime towards the end of June.

Noctua’s ‘next-gen’ 140mm fan has been teetering on release for months, nay, years.  Every time it seemed to be getting somewhere Noctua would give it a kicking in testing and find something wasn’t quite right. 

Most recently, a “slight risk of critical deformation” over extended use, which pushed back the release by around six months. Though it was already pushed back by around a year prior, to redesign the frame. It’s also been in development for nearly a decade now.

The fan’s extremely tight tolerances between the blades and frame make any minor movement poten…

I’ll spare you my cat puns and tell you straight up: The life sim where you play as a cat is back. There’s gardening, foraging, decorating, wooing your cat mate, and quite a lot of feline combat, actually. Cattails: Wildwood Story is planning to launch later in 2023 but it has a demo available right now on Steam. 

I played the first Cattails game, which was just called Cattails and released in 2017, years back and was surprised that there’s actually a big territory control and combat aspect to it alongside all the usual cozy activities of similar life sims. That’s returned for the sequel, which sends your cat colony to claim a new home where you’ll put down roots but also fight against other cat factions around the map.

The new demo for Cattails: Wildwood …

It’s been a wild couple of weeks for tabletop RPGs—if you’re not caught up, you can read our summary of events here, but in short, Wizards of the Coast have moved to change the terms around companies creating Dungeons & Dragons-compatible products in a less than favourable direction, to the dismay of almost the entire community. 

In the wake of the controversy, several publishers have drawn lines in the sand, either moving away from D&D or challenging the legitimacy of the move. Notably, Pathfinder creator Paizo did both, and announced its own version of an open license, recruiting other major players such as Chaosium and Kobold press to join it. 

Now that’s starting to look like the beginnings of a trend, as Free League—the very successful publ…

So yeah, ray tracing on the Steam Deck is now properly a thing. It’s been do-able if you wanted to dig in and do some Linux-y tweaking before, but with the latest beta OS Valve is starting to go native. For a device that costs less than the price of an RTX 3050—a graphics card no-one should buy at that price—to be able to enable ray tracing that’s worth a damn is seriously impressive.

Valve has announced the new Steam Deck OS beta in the handheld’s Preview channel, and updates the operating system of the device to the Mesa 23.1 graphics driver. So far, so dry, but the interesting stuff is in what that actually means in terms of games. For one, it gets rid of some graphical corruption issues that exist with the current build of Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty and GPU crashes “i…

There are, at times, feats which show the ingenuity and resourcefulness of mankind, like the invention of the wheel, or the discovery of penicillin. Joining these accomplishments today is Twitter user ToT who, spitting in the face of financial limitations, has turned a game built to create, pose, and have relations with cute anime “waifus” into their own mecha factory.

Koikatsu Party (or just Koikatsu! in Japanese) is, from what I can tell, a game that mostly centres around bringing ‘your waifu to laifu’ (the Steam page’s words, not mine), dressing them up, and then having raunchy sex with them. Okay—that’s a little unfair. The game has plenty of wholesome options too, such as taking your digital dream girl out on dates, or posing them in a shockingly comprehensive studio.